Mr. Varun Satia, Founder and Chief Storyteller, Kraftshala, conducted a Marketing Workshop highlighting the Importance of Summer Internship for the students of IIM Amritsar. Mr. Varun Satia has been responsible for creating effective communication for brands across food, e-commerce, and lifestyle categories including working with Nestle on Maggi noodles, Kit Kat chocolates etc.

Commencing his session with an engaging game, Mr. Satia introduced the concept of summer internship. Mr. Satia also informed the students about how the role of summer internship has changed over the course of years and how the internship package has drastically increased in a span of last 7-8 years.

The reason for this shift has been attributed to some consultancies strategy to employ summer internship as a tool to better gauge the ability and capability of the student when a one hour interview might fall short to suffice for the need. Summer internship, being a permanent member of the B-school calendar looked promising for the same purpose and now has become an instrumental tool in eventual hiring. In fact, summers are seen as something more serious than the final hiring.

The process of summer internship has consequently become more and more complex. Mr. Satia expounded this by presenting the entire schedule of a typical summer internship program, how it starts from Induction, moves to Project Briefing, First Review, Formal Mid Review and ending up at Final Review and PPI.

Mr. Satia emphasized on the importance of speaking up and also developing the art of better communication and making better presentations. He gave the students a key insight that organizations run on reputation and thus an intern’s performance is directly related to Talent and Acquisition group of the company. Thus being attentive is of paramount importance.

Mr. Satia then discussed about the various phases of the internship program, the types of projects an intern will get into, the challenges faced by him/her, the appropriate actions he/she should take to prove a point and get a PPO. He specifically mentioned that since interns represent a low Return on Effort to project guides/managers, it becomes imperative that they perform and follow an effective plan such that their efforts are aligned with the openness of the campaign being handled. Mr. Satia also emphasized that though there is an element of luck, with hard work, perseverance and right attitude, one can actually convert a PPI into a PPO.

Mr. Satia, in his presentation discussed about the brand and the sales program run by Kraftshala, the various merits, highlights, opportunities and the incentives these programs will provide, which can give a real boost to an intern’s summers’ and even final placement’s experience.